Impact of Non-Ideal Efficiency on Bits Per Joule Performance of Base Station Transmissions

Energy efficiency has become an important metric for the future system design. In traditional design methods, the link transmission strategies were investigated with only transmit power considered. We shall show in this paper that from the whole system´s aspect, the radiated energy used for data transmission is only a portion of the overall power consumption, whose ratio depends on many practical issues such as the transmission distance, the modulation level, the non-ideal power amplifier efficiency, as well as the circuit and processing power. Through closed-form formula derivation, analysis remarks, and numerical examples, we shall show the impact of different system parameters and configurations on the whole system´s power consumption and energy efficiency, which in turn, sheds a light on the design philosophy for maximizing the energy efficiency of a base station as a whole.